ARD Education & Awareness

What does the word "iatrogenic" mean?
Iatros means physician in Greek, and -genic, meaning induced by, is derived from the International Scientific Vocabulary. Combined, of course, they become iatrogenic, meaning physician-induced. Iatrogenic disease is obviously, then, disease which is caused by a physician.
Or perhaps it is not so obvious.
The growing complexity of modern life (and medicine) has promoted the elasticity of language. In common usage, then, iatrogenic disease is now applied to any adverse effect associated with any medical practitioner or treatment. The practitioner need not be a physician, he might be a nurse or a radiology technician, or any one of the scores of differentiated healthcare workers encountered in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, or offices, or for that matter in the ambulance on the way to one of those places. For those who advance the language to the frontier, iatrogenic disease can be caused by practitioners whose association with medicine is negligible or antithetical, such as homeopaths, chiropractors, and psychologists (especially now that they are lobbying for the authority to write drug prescriptions). Or perhaps even Grandma, if she is the one handing out the pills.
Treatment is a term stretched beyond reason. It might refer to something as tangible as surgery or as subtle as a conversation, if the person conducting the conversation is considered a health specialist. (And who isn't?)
It might be a potent drug or a placebo. It might be effective or worthless, real or imaginary. While iatrogenic has retained at least a modicum of comprehensibility, treatment has been utterly debased both in word and deed. Therapy is in pretty much the same rundown shape since it was linked to the prefix psycho-.
Because of the intrusion of the Therapeutic State into every cranny of modern life, we have now made iatrogenic illness refer to any adverse reaction caused by anyone thought or claiming to be a health specialist, using any treatment (or lack thereof if the thereof lacking causes the illness) in any setting. With the heavy burden we have loaded onto the word, it is essential for any use of iatrogenic to include clear directions as what the user intends. That way we can distinguish between a person who is dying from an infection obtained from a physician's contaminated hands and a person who sues his doctor for not informing him that skydiving is a dangerous hobby.

Now that we have entered the time of physicians intentionally killing their patients and calling it "physician assisted suicide," iatrogenic takes on a whole new meaning. To understand that we need to look at Germany in the 1940s.
Nicolas S. Martin Executive Director American Iatrogenic Association ©2002, AiA
www.iatrogenic.org American Iatrogenic Association 2513 S. Gessner #232 Houston, Texas 77063-2096
http://www.iatrogenic.org/define.html